Re: Requesting advice regarding creating a custom Debian distribution
On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, icelinux@icelinux.net wrote:
> Why does the Debian distribution need so many applications?
Because the people who use Debian need different sets of applications.
> It doesn't, it is nice to have them available though. It may depend
> upon one perception of sluggish. I find Fedora's Gnome desktop to be
> sluggish on an ATHLON 2000 XP. I tried Ubuntu with XFCE and while
> the desktop loaded fine common applications like Mozilla and
> Seamonkey were unbearbly slow on a 500Mhz with 200Mb of ram. As
> mentioned, RAM can be a constraint so we are trying to use less. As
> mentioned, it would be nice to have a 1 iso version for use on older
> hardware. I want to, we have that freedom, correct?
You appear to be conflating a few different things here.
The case where the number of packages available has a significant
impact is when you're talking about machines which have so little
memory that they are unable to hold the dependency tree in memory.[1]
[We're talking about machines with less than 32M here, in general.]
In the case of runtime performance, it's the set of packages that
users actually decide to install, not the number of packages that are
available that matters.
As far as the set that's appropriate for medium-memory users, that's
really a user specific thing; what can be improved are the selection
of packages for this case, which is an area where working with task
selection and the installer will have the most significant impact.
At the end of the day though, your time is your own. Spend it as you
will.
Don Armstrong
1: Exposing fewer packages to such machines by only showing "relevant"
packages and/or improvements to libapt may be useful here, but it's
not an area that I'm terribly experienced in.
--
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien
a ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien a retrancher.
(Perfection is apparently not achieved when nothing more can be added,
but when nothing else can be removed.)
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupe'ry, Terres des Hommes
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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